A few versions ago, a preference search engine (used to find features in the admin panel) has made people very happy. Taking this a step further, preferences can now be tagged as basic, advanced, new and experimental, and this permits the admin to filter.

By using the "basic" filter, new admins will see only a small portion of preferences, but the most commonly used one. This will ease the learning curve.

1.3. MediaWiki importer

1.4. Connect

2. BigBlueButton update

Added support for version 0.8, including Record/Playback. The Wiki plugin has a new argument to enable recording of the rooms. When made available by BigBlueButton after the meeting, the recordings will be listed below the plugin.

3. Comments

3.1. New interface

A new AJAX comments interface has been deployed, allowing for lighter page loads and faster moderation.

The new comment interface is also used for tracker comments, which are no longer an independent feature.

3.2. Akismet

4. Daily reports

Daily reports was extended to cover calendar and tracker items, as well as their comments. Moreover, default text from the reports of the message can be currently sent in user language if it that text has been translated in the corresponding language.php file.

5. File Galleries

5.1. Upload from URL

Allows to upload a file in file galleries through a URL instead of uploading it from disk. Tiki will pull the file and attach the source as a property on the file. The file can be refreshed periodically from the source. Archives will be created as required.

Cache-control headers are respected to avoid excessive work on the remote host.

5.3. Draw

Introduced in Tiki7, Draw is much improved in Tiki8. It can be full page or page-sized.

5.4. SCORM Support

SCORM is a package format for Learning Management Systems. Initial handling of those packages was included, namely the creation of a tracker item based on the meta-data stored in the file to allow for package management. More improvements are expected in the future.

9.2. Plugin Dialog

9.3. Plugin Draw

9.4. Plugin Slider

This plugin is very similar to both PluginTabs and PluginCarousel in what it does to content, the main difference is both the user interface and what it can display. PluginSlider can handle wiki syntax within itself, it can display text, images, video, flash, basically anything...

9.5. Plugin Timeline

10. Profiles

Tracker fields can be enabled/disabled by a tiki site admin. Therefore, new preferences are available to indicate such preference. Some of them are disabled by default, and if you were using them in your profile objects, then you need to define them as new preferences enabled.

11. Programmer & Integrator Toys

11.1. Internal events

Tiki now emits internal events that customizers can hook on to attach special behaviors instead of modifying the code directly. Events are currenltly available in at least wiki pages and tracker items. See blogpost20.

11.2. Smarty 3

The very first version of Tiki (October 2002) was using Smarty v2.2. Tiki 7 used a newer Smarty version, but is still using Smarty 2.

Smarty is a fundamental part of Tiki and in Tiki7, there are over 800 template files using the Smarty format. An upgrade of a software project integrated for over 8 years and covering hundreds of files: this is not to be taken lightly!

Special thanks to Stéphane Casset who led the upgrade and to all the community members that helped out with testing and debugging.

And of course, a big thank you to Monte Ohrt, Uwe Tews and the Smarty community.

Among the benefits, administrators entering Smarty code in user modules or pretty trackers will be able to do the changes without fear. Syntax errors will be caught gracefully and reported.

Please note that Smarty 3 is not fully backward compatible with Smarty 2, so if you are upgrading from a previous Tiki version and you have custom template files you might have to update them manually. Check the list of Smarty 3 known incompatibilities with Smarty 2.

11.3. Webservices

Tiki now provides a series of web services for various components. The JSON services are used internally to handle the AJAX requests, but can also be called externally. Check out the various controllers under lib/core/Services/.

13.2. Plugin Custom Search

13.3. Indexing improvements

Relations are now indexed, which allows to filter based on data in the new tracker relations field, semantic links, user favorites

When using the files tracker field type, the content of the attached files are indexed with the tracker item

Tracker fields are now indexed differently based on the field type

Forum posts and replies are now indexed independently

Comment count is indexed with the object

13.4. Internal result cache

Results for the same query are cached internally until the index is modified, speeding up frequent requests and pagination.

The total amount of results is now limited to a configured value. The full amount of results is provided as an estimate, refined search is required to access all results.

14. Staging & Approval Removed

The Staging and Approval feature was removed from the codebase after being replaced by Flagged Revisions in the previous version. Users of staging and approval should approve or reject all of the content before upgrading and set-up flagged revision approval after upgrade. If not done before the upgrade, the staging pages will be left as-is to be handled manually.

15. System Administration

15.1. HTTP Proxy credentials

In addition to specifying the HTTP proxy host and port, the proxy username and password can now be specified in the configuration.

15.2. HTTP Source Authentication

The administrator of a site can now specify credentials to use when accessing a remote HTTP source. This allows for any file access on a given domain to be provided with credentials. For example, fetching files from a URL in file galleries and RSS feeds benefit from this feature.

15.3. IIS: improved support

Previous problems with file loading under IIS are resolved (when the URL Rewrite module is not installed). The SEFURL should now work OK on IIS. The SEFURL panel now also warns if the web.config file is outdated.

15.4. InnoDB: Preliminary support

Tiki now offers as an experimental option to install in InnoDB tables, rather than MyISAM tables. InnoDB uses row level locking which may improve performance for some sites. It is also "crash proof". With InnoDB, manual fixing of tables should be a thing of the past. This implementation does not yet use the full power of InnoDB (foreign keys and transactions).

16.2. Tracker Fields: New Administration

The administration for tracker fields was completely rewritten to improve user experience.

New features include:

Drag & Drop sorting of fields

Some properties are editable directly from the list

Dialog to add new fields with automatic list refreshing

Editing field options is done via separate fields, providing for hints and value selectors when available.

Moreover, tracker fields can now be enabled/disabled by a tiki site admin. Therefore, new preferences are available to indicate such choice through the Tracker Admin panel.

Some of the tracker fields are disabled by default, and if you were using them in your profile objects, then you need to define their corresponding preferences to have them enabled in order to upgrade your profiles to work with Tiki 8.

16.3. Tracker Admin: New interface

Complete redesign of the interface to organize the options in a logical way.

16.4. New Tracker Field: Files

New tracker field allowing to upload files into file galleries and to attach them to the tracker item. The content of the attached files will be indexed along with the tracker item in the Unified Index.

The new field type makes extensive use of HTML5 to allow multiple file upload through the browse controls or through drag & drop. Upload progress is also provided for each file as they are sent.

16.5. New Tracker Field: Relations

New field type to link with other objects in tiki using a qualifier. Those relations are being indexed in unified search and also accessible through PluginRelations.

16.9. Tracker reports

17. User favorites

Upgrade notes

Besides reading the general Upgrade notes, keep in mind also that Tiki7 introduced several major changes from prior versions. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, you are encouraged to read first the pages describing the changes introduced in earlier versions of Tiki, such as:

Keep in mind that your Custom site header might be gone, in which case you'll need to manually re-do it using module management.

In other cases, custom top bar code or other custom sections you had coded in Admin Home > Look & Feel > General Layout Options might be misplaced. If so, go to Admin > Modules and set the proper order of the modules (see Theme Header Modules for more information on the proper order for header modules).